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CV-010 Jewel robbery · London 2009

The Graff Diamonds Robbery — A £40M Daylight Heist Betrayed by a Forgotten Phone

disguisesmash-and-grabconvictedpartial-recovery1990s-2000s
Haul
~£40M (US$65M) in jewels
Target
Graff Diamonds, New Bond Street, London
Closed
Aug 2009 · convicted 2010
Status
Convicted

Summary

At about 4.40pm on 6 August 2009, two men in sharp suits stepped out of a taxi and into Graff Diamonds on New Bond Street in Mayfair, London. Within roughly two minutes they had drawn handguns, swept 43 rings, bracelets, necklaces and watches worth nearly £40 million — about US$65 million — into a bag, taken a member of staff briefly hostage, and walked back out into the street. It was, at the time, the largest jewellery robbery in British history. The two raiders had been transformed by a professional make-up artist who, over some four hours, used latex prosthetics and wigs to age and alter them so completely that they made no real effort to hide from the store's cameras.

The outcome is settled and is stated here without suspense. The crew was caught and convicted. After a trial at Woolwich Crown Court, Aman Kassaye, who planned and led the raid, was convicted of conspiracy to rob, kidnapping and firearm offences and on 7 August 2010 sentenced to 23 years; Craig Calderwood received 21 years, and Solomun Beyene, Clinton Mogg and Thomas Thomas were each sentenced to 16 years for conspiracy to rob. The jewels themselves, however, were almost entirely lost. They are believed to have been broken up and the stones recut for anonymous resale; reporting indicates that only a single item, a yellow diamond, was ever traced, reportedly re-cut and pawned in Hong Kong in 2012.

The case is studied for the distance between its polished front end and its careless exit. The disguise was the work of a specialist deceived into thinking he was preparing performers for a music video, and the raid itself was fast, controlled and brazen in daylight on one of London's most exclusive streets. What undid the crew was not the robbery but the flight from it: a chaotic sequence of vehicle switches, a collision with a black cab, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone left behind in the abandoned car.

The Graff robbery is therefore a lesson in where heists actually fail. The crew solved the hard problems of disguise and execution with professional care, and then surrendered all of it to the part they treated as an afterthought — getting away cleanly and leaving nothing behind.

Timeline

Before 6 Aug 2009
The disguise is commissioned
A professional make-up artist, told the work was for a music video, used latex prosthetics and wigs over roughly four hours to alter the raiders' faces and skin tone so they could ignore the store's cameras.
6 Aug 2009, ~4.40pm
Entry by taxi
Two men in suits arrived at Graff Diamonds on New Bond Street by London taxi and entered posing as customers.
6 Aug 2009
Armed takeover
Inside, the pair produced handguns, threatened staff, and swept 43 items of jewellery worth nearly £40 million into a bag in about two minutes.
6 Aug 2009
Hostage taken
A shop assistant was briefly held at gunpoint and forced into the street as the robbers left, then released.
6 Aug 2009
Shots and first switch
One robber fired a shot to clear the street; the pair escaped in a blue BMW, abandoned it in nearby Dover Street where a second shot was fired into the ground, and switched to a silver Mercedes.
6 Aug 2009
The crash and the phone
During the rapid getaway the crew collided with a black cab; in the haste to transfer vehicles, a pay-as-you-go mobile phone was left wedged in the abandoned car.
6 Aug 2009 onward
The thread from the handset
Anonymous numbers stored on the recovered phone allowed police to begin identifying the robbers and their network.
By mid-Oct 2009
Arrests
Investigators arrested a group of suspects over the following weeks as the case was assembled.
2010
Trial
The defendants were tried at Woolwich Crown Court over a period of months on conspiracy to rob and related charges.
7 Aug 2010
Sentencing
Aman Kassaye was sentenced to 23 years; Craig Calderwood to 21; and Solomun Beyene, Clinton Mogg and Thomas Thomas to 16 years each.
2012
A single trace
Reporting indicates one item, a yellow diamond, was recut and pawned in Hong Kong; the bulk of the haul was never recovered.

Faces Built for the Cameras

The Graff robbery began not on New Bond Street but in a make-up chair. The two men who would walk into the store were prepared by a professional artist who spent around four hours applying latex prosthetics, skin toners and wigs to alter their features and age them visibly, the kind of transformation associated with film and stage rather than crime. The artist was deceived about the purpose: told the job was for a music video, the specialist had no reason to suspect that the careful, hours-long work was building disguises for an armed raid. One of the men is reported to have remarked that his own mother would not have recognised him.

That craft inverted the usual logic of a robbery. Where most raiders treat the store's cameras as the enemy and cover their faces, the Graff pair did the opposite: confident that what the lenses recorded was a fabricated face, they made little attempt to hide from them. The disguise was not a mask to be torn off in panic but an engineered identity that the cameras would faithfully, and uselessly, capture, letting the men enter calmly as customers without the furtiveness that triggers suspicion.

The choice reflected a sophisticated understanding of how such cases are usually solved — through identification from surveillance footage — and an attempt to defeat that mechanism at its source. By making the recorded image false, the crew aimed to render the store's best forensic asset worthless. It very nearly worked at the level it was designed for; the footage of the raid did not identify the men. The flaw lay elsewhere, in evidence the disguise could not touch.

Two Minutes on New Bond Street

The execution matched the preparation for control and speed. At about 4.40pm the two men arrived by taxi and entered Graff posing as customers, blending into the ordinary traffic of an exclusive jeweller. Once inside they drew handguns, threatened the staff, and moved with practised efficiency, sweeping 43 rings, bracelets, necklaces and watches worth close to £40 million into a bag in roughly two minutes — among them a necklace reported to be worth several million pounds on its own. The raid was brazen precisely in its setting: broad daylight, on one of the most surveilled and exclusive streets in London.

The violence was calibrated to control the scene rather than to harm. As they left, the robbers took a shop assistant briefly hostage, forcing the staff member into the street at gunpoint before releasing them, and one of the men fired a shot to scatter onlookers and clear a path. A second shot was discharged into the ground at the first vehicle change. The shots were instruments of crowd management and escape, not assault, intended to buy the seconds and space the getaway required on a busy afternoon.

As a robbery, it was close to flawless. The disguises had defeated the cameras, the takeover had been fast and total, and the haul was the largest in British jewellery-theft history to that point. By the moment the men reached their first car, every hard problem of the heist appeared solved. What remained was the part the crew had evidently treated as secondary, and it was there that the operation came apart.

The Phone in the Abandoned Car

The collapse came from the getaway, where polish gave way to chaos. The escape was built on rapid vehicle switches across a short distance — out of Graff in a blue BMW, abandoned in nearby Dover Street, then into a silver Mercedes, with jewellery reportedly passed to a further accomplice — a sequence intended to break any pursuit. But the rapid changes introduced exactly the disorder that careful disguise had been meant to avoid. During the flight the crew collided with a black cab, and in the scramble to transfer vehicles after the crash, a pay-as-you-go mobile phone was left behind, wedged between the driver's seat and the handbrake of the abandoned car.

That handset was the case. The disguises had made the surveillance footage useless, but the phone the crew left in the car could not be altered or recut. From the anonymous numbers stored on it, investigators reconstructed the network behind the raid and worked outward to its members, making arrests over the following weeks. The robbery the cameras could not solve was solved instead by a forgotten object that carried the connections the disguises were designed to hide.

The reckoning followed at Woolwich Crown Court. After a trial running into months, Aman Kassaye, who had planned and executed the heist, was convicted of conspiracy to rob, kidnapping and firearm offences and on 7 August 2010 — almost exactly a year after the raid — sentenced to 23 years; Craig Calderwood received 21 years, and Solomun Beyene, Clinton Mogg and Thomas Thomas were each sentenced to 16 years for conspiracy to rob. The jewels did not come back. The stones are believed to have been broken up and recut for anonymous sale, with only a single yellow diamond reportedly traced, recut and pawned in Hong Kong in 2012, leaving the overwhelming majority of the £40 million haul unrecovered.

The Five Factors

01
Defeat the evidence at its source
The crew's central insight was that jewel robberies are usually solved by identification from camera footage, so they corrupted the footage itself with engineered disguises. Attacking the mechanism of detection, rather than merely fleeing it, is what made the recorded images useless — and what nearly succeeded.
02
Deceived expertise launders the preparation
The disguises were built by a genuine professional misled into believing the work was for a music video, so the most skilled, traceable step in the plan was performed by someone with no knowledge of the crime. Co-opting a specialist under a false pretext supplies capability while insulating the operation from a witting accomplice.
03
Calibrated violence as scene control
The handguns, the brief hostage-taking and the shots fired were used to manage the crowd and clear an escape, not to wound, trading lethal force for time and space on a busy street. The distinction shaped the charges and reflects a logic in which intimidation is a tool of egress rather than an end.
04
The getaway is where heists fail
Every hard problem of the robbery was solved before the crew reached their cars, and the operation unravelled in the flight — a crash, a frantic transfer, and an object left behind. Escape routes deserve the same rigour as the raid, because chaos in the getaway destroys the discipline that preceded it.
05
One untouched object outweighs a perfect disguise
The faces were fabricated, but the abandoned phone carried real, unalterable connections that mapped the network. A single piece of physical evidence that cannot be disguised or recut can defeat an otherwise meticulous concealment of identity.

Aftermath

The financial loss was almost never recovered. Of the roughly £40 million in jewellery taken, the stones are believed to have been broken up and recut so they could be sold without provenance, and reporting indicates that only one item — a yellow diamond, reportedly recut and pawned in Hong Kong in 2012 — was ever traced. For Graff, as for the diamond trade generally, the case underlined a hard truth about high-value stones: once they are cut down and dispersed, identification of the thieves does little to bring the property back.

The robbery entered the record as a benchmark, the largest jewellery heist in British history at the time and second only to the £53 million Securitas depot raid of 2006 among British robberies. Its most distinctive legacy was the disguise: the spectacle of an armed raid carried out by men aged thirty years by a deceived make-up artist gave the case lasting notoriety and a place in accounts of how far thieves will go to corrupt the evidence against them.

The durable lesson was about the limits of even sophisticated concealment. The crew had attacked the vulnerability of camera identification with real skill, only to be undone by the ordinary disorder of escape and a single object they failed to take with them — the reckoning complete at the level of justice, and almost wholly absent at the level of recovery.

Lessons

  1. Treat the getaway as the heart of the operation; the discipline of a raid counts for nothing if the escape descends into improvisation and collision.
  2. Assume that one unalterable object — a phone, a print, a fibre — can undo elaborate disguise, and that physical traces, not faces, are what investigations seize on.
  3. Recognise that deceiving a skilled professional can supply capability while hiding intent, and scrutinise unusual, hours-long commissions framed as harmless work.
  4. Understand that for recut, fungible stones, arresting the thieves rarely restores the property; prevention and rapid interception outrank post-hoc conviction.
  5. Do not mistake a flawless front end for a finished crime; security and criminals alike are decided in the seams — the exit, the handoff, the thing left behind.

References